00:00it's becoming normal. I read a report from a BBC reporter in Delhi a couple of years ago
00:06and he was saying covering this story feels like watching and being in the same dystopian film
00:12every year. It's the same characters, it's the same plot, it's the same script, the outcome is
00:17always the same, nothing changes. And it made me feel worried for like, you know, our summers in
00:23this country that this extreme heat, it's really scary, it's really bad for our health, it's really
00:28worrying. And yet a lot of the time, the response just seems to be, well, how do we adapt to
00:33it?
00:33How do we adjust to it? It just sort of becomes the new norm. It doesn't feel like an emergency.
00:39And I think activists say that, you know, the reason is that pollution doesn't cause immediate
00:44problems for people. So you're ingesting high levels of pollution causes your health to deteriorate
00:50slowly. A Lancet study found that pollution led to more than 2.3 million premature deaths in India in
00:562019, which is an emergency. But the same way we talk about climate change, it's not an immediate
01:01emergency in the way that like a terrorist attack is. It's also an inequality issue, you know, like
01:08wealthier households can buy air purifiers, they can work from home, they can use private transport,
01:13they can sometimes leave the city. But you have much poorer street vendors, construction workers,
01:18traffic police, of course, children who don't have any say in the matter, they have to work in this.
